


Let Them Come to Berlin

by DiamantineMind



Series: Thawing [1]
Category: Black Widow (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: 1960s, AU, Celebrities, Cold War, Elias is the Son of Emma Frost, Gen, Hellfire Club, History, Major Original Character(s), Minor Original Character(s), Mutant Powers, Mutant Rights, Mutants, Not Canon Compliant, Original mutant character - Freeform, Red Room (Marvel), Spies & Secret Agents, Super Soldier Serum, Undercover Missions, Undercover Natasha Romanov, West Berlin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-27
Updated: 2018-04-27
Packaged: 2019-04-17 09:55:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14186361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiamantineMind/pseuds/DiamantineMind
Summary: Situated between two global superpowers during the Cold War, the dispirited city of West Berlin hungers for much-needed hope. On June 26, 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy arrives to answer their prayers. His arrival has attracted a great deal of attention, though, and not all of it is benevolent. Case in point: K.G.B. agent and possible Black Widow Natalia Alianovna. Enter mother and son mutant duo Emma and Elias Frost to the rescue, even if their motive for safeguarding the President of the United States of America and their response to the Soviet threat are a mite morally dubious.





	Let Them Come to Berlin

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I own nothing except for the original characters which appear here. All rights belong to Marvel Comics.

# WEST BERLIN, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY  
HIGH-DENSITY TARGET AREA,  
THE RATHAUS SCHÖNEBERG  
JUNE 26, 1963

There was not a cloud in the summer sky arcing over the cityscape of West Berlin when President Kennedy was being prepared to mount the wooden stage on the steps of Schöneberg’s town hall. Sandstone, glass, and precise right angles reached heavenward to scrape the curve of the sun, the very same sun which offered the visiting foreign leader, his lengthy entourage, and his even more extensive security detail a welcome somehow warmer than the already ebullient salutation given by the 400,000 Germans in the Rudolph-Wilde-Platz and the streets surrounding the town hall square. Together, they chanted “J.F.K.” and “Kennedy” in anticipation. Some individuals leaned precariously out of the windows and stood on the high roofs of buildings across Martin-Luther-Straße, which was closed itself due to being clogged with pedestrians, to get a better view of the happenings at the seat of West Berlin’s state senate. It was hardly a quotidian occurrence for the leader of the free world to turn up in one’s city while on his European tour and decide to deliver what would assuredly be a rousing anti-communist speech. His words would incense the Soviets stationed just a stone’s throw away on the other side of that ghastly wall.

As he patrolled the southern edge of the crowd, Elias Gideon Frost appeared like any other civilian, barring the fact that he outdressed every other person present save perhaps President Kennedy. Although Elias’s back was turned to the stage and he was actively striding in the opposite direction of it, Elias saw its image in his mind through the eyes of an ambitious front-row journalist, a middle-aged butcher whose son sat upon his shoulders, and an octogenarian wilting in the sun—a handcrafted lectern decorated with arrangements of potted ferns and poppies stood at the lip of the stage. The town hall’s regal columns and spire-like clock tower served as a striking backdrop for the stage. According to the intel Elias and his mother had mined from the head of the president’s chief of security, Kennedy would be taking the stage in—the journalist, butcher, and crone glanced up at the unblinking and ever vigilant eye of the clock tower—exactly two minutes and sixteen seconds.

Elias knew that he was probably about to jinx the entire operation, but he could not help but be surprised by how smoothly everything was going. An unbroken sea of love—nearly half a million hopeful hearts soaring together like a kettle of strong-winged hawks. Not a single thought or feeling out of place.

When Elias and his mother had initially made the executive decision to shadow President Kennedy on his European tour—their machinations and maneuverings had secured him the Oval Office, after all, so it was needless to say that they were invested in their political pawn—they had predicted that he might encounter some form of Soviet hostility, especially in West Berlin. Rabble-rousers, assassins, and others of that potentially imperiling ilk. That there was not even a whisper of dissent or a notion of ill will to be detected in the location Elias and his mother had deemed to pose the highest threat to their asset seemed to him the irony of ironies due to West Berlin’s proximity to the Soviet Union’s largest espionage ring outside of the boundaries of the U.S.S.R.

He might actually be able to properly enjoy himself at this speech. Elias’s intuition—and admittedly his telepathic insights—gave him the impression that this would be a particularly splendid one. Maybe even a watershed of the decade. Elias could only hope. Kennedy had not failed them yet in his role as the face of sweeping reforms to America’s—and by extent, the world’s—more pressing social issues (particularly those concerning civil, women's, and mutant's rights), so the likelihood of the man truly disappointing Elias and his mother was infinitesimal. Of course, Kennedy had reason to push for widespread legal and social protections for mutants; he was a mutant himself, gifted with a modest form of telepathic persuasion that helped him to move and inspire crowds. Kennedy had been hand-picked and groomed by Elias and his mother for a reason.

Regardless of whatever pithy statement or witticism Kennedy proffered, the crowd would gobble it up because it came direct from his charismatic lips. The congregation was starving, wandering aimlessly in the treacherous desert that so many West Germans found themselves in. Soviet aggression to the east. The impending retirement of their revered Chancellor Adenauer, who had led them out of post-war financial despair as best as he could. In such a desperate climate, Kennedy was their manna, upper crust Bostonian accent and all. 

Elias had grown up hearing his mother recount tales of the bleak hope of the colonists and of the rebellious hope of the American Revolutionaries, so he knew something of the passion that began with a murmur and ended with a roar which sounded in the soul of all humans at some time or another. Having borne witness firsthand to the gamut of human experience alongside her in the War of Southern Aggression and the Second World War, Elias had seen and felt similar strains of the sentiment numerous times before. The hope which gripped the throng in West Berlin today, though, was a wholly unique species born of strife under factious politics and a life of being rent in half by two global superpowers locked in a deadly game of tug-of-war where Berlin was but a tense line in the sand waiting to be trod on. 

The cool voice of Emma Grace Frost entered her son’s mind and stirred Elias from his musings: _“Anything of concern to the south, darling?”_

Elias scanned the crowd as he walked, the glacier blue eyes he inherited from the woman on the other side of the crowd flickering across a sea of faces but seeing so much more—thoughts thrumming and feelings bursting on the surface of each mind, secrets and longings and fears burrowed a little deeper in the nest of each psyche, so many tightly-woven psychic strands of color and identity in the atmosphere that the town hall square and the neighboring three city blocks looked to be one monstrous gnarled tangle of multicolored yarn. Elias wiped his brow of the perspiration gathering there and vainly wished for a moment that he possessed a gift that allowed him to manipulate more than just minds and matter, such as a talent that might allow him to manipulate the sky into relenting its scorching assault on him and every other member of the crowd. His gaze fell upon a hippie, and he smirked.

 _“Nothing except a pair of ill-fitting bell-bottoms paired with a suede jacket that has entirely too much fringe,”_ Elias said through the psychic link he and his mother had forged between themselves almost a hundred years ago now. _“Would you like to see this bloody disaster too, Mother?”_

 _“I would rather not—”_ Emma began to say in the same moment that Elias opened their psychic link more fully and allowed her sight of the man in question through his own eyes. _“Christ, that is indeed a disaster. Do you see those Cuban-heeled shoes he’s wearing, Elias? Just look at them. I want to vomit.”_

 _“Not in my mind you won’t,”_ Elias laughed as he returned their connection to its former state, nudging his mother out of his headspace. _“I assume it’s right dreary to the north, then, if you’re checking up on me?”_

_“Have I ever told you that you were always a precocious and astute child?”_

_“A time or two,”_ Elias said with a telepathic wink. _“Thousand, that is. The apple ne’er falls too far from the bough, though, does it?”_

In the case of Elias and Emma Frost, the proverb rang particularly true. Elias, from the heart-shaped birthmark no larger than a pencil eraser on the inside of his left wrist to the nigh limitless psychic power that resided within the confines of his diamantine mind, was the masculinized mirror image of his mother, who was only two centuries his senior. This year she was turning 328 years old, having been born into a prominent Scandinavian-blooded Puritan mercantile family in 1635 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, while Elias himself would be experiencing his 119th birthday in November. As it turned out, some psychics—especially the ones who can bend psionic energy to their will on the subatomic level like Elias and Emma—could be quite long-lived and not look a day over thirty. The downside, though, was that Elias had lost track of the times his mother had been mistaken for his twin sister, or even worse, his wife.

 _“If the information we got from Jack’s head of security still holds true, which it should, Jack will be coming onstage in twenty-one seconds,”_ Emma said. _“I haven’t sensed any trouble either, but with all these positively frenetic Germans, it’s difficult to do any serious reading.”_

 _“I’ll second that,”_ Elias said with a glower as he raked his eyes across the still chanting crowd and continued patrolling the southern perimeter of the horde. _“I’ll stay on my toes and swing around the back of the crowd by the buildings across Martin-Luther like we planned.”_

 _“I’m on my way to the stage now,”_ Emma replied. _“The sheer absence of Soviets is disconcerting.”_

 _“You’re a cynic, Mum,”_ Elias shook his head fondly.

 _“Survivor is more like it,”_ Emma retorted as she moved into position before the stage. _“Three seconds. Call me if you find anything. Kisses, darling.”_

_“Kisses, Mother—”_

The moment President Kennedy walked out onto the stage, the joyous cheers of 400,000 Germans echoed thunderously throughout Berlin, and Elias bit back a wave of nausea. He forced himself to deny his overwhelming inclination to shut them all out, to narrow his psychic earshot from more or less the whole city down to nothing. So many people in such a small space suddenly pitching their voices and emotions up an octave or four was not the most pleasant experience for a telepath actively attempting to be something akin to a thought-seeking anti-Soviet radar. Elias massaged the bridge of his nose and soldiered on, even when every man, woman, and child in West Berlin swooned when Kennedy placed his hands on the lectern prepared for him and flashed the crowd a boyish grin.

“I am proud to come to this city as the guest of your distinguished Mayor, who has symbolized throughout the world the fighting spirit of West Berlin,” President Kennedy’s voice thankfully silenced the crowd—physically, at least—as Elias stepped onto Martin-Luther-Straße which ran parallel to the square and the face of the town hall beyond it. He waded through the speechless foot traffic, passing under shade trees and streetlights dotting the sidewalk. “And I am proud to visit the Federal Republic with your distinguished Chancellor, who for so many years has committed Germany to democracy and freedom and progress.”

Uproarious applause exploded in the silence following Kennedy’s pause like an Axis mortar shell. Or like a Confederate cannon. Elias could not quite tell for certain, but he tensed anyway, lingering in the middle of the street before pushing on. He stepped onto the sidewalk and looked up at the plain six-story sandstone building before him and the nearly identical ones running the length of this side of the street as far as the eye could see. A brunette woman with a cigarette pinched between her lips vigorously clapped from where she leaned her upper body out of a fourth-story window. Three construction workers sat on the edge of the shingled roof, the dangling soles of their work boots the only way Elias could visibly tell anyone sat sixty to seventy feet above his head.

It was then that Elias noticed that something was amiss. A flicker of red out of the corner of his eye, red a shade at once subdued yet painfully bright. Carried on it was a thought that didn’t belong, a whisper of an emotion made as soft as the sweep of a butterfly’s papery wings by its origin’s distance from Elias and his own closeness to the pressing crowd. He needed to break away. Before the psychic signature escaped him and slipped away forever into the psionic jumble all around him, Elias sank his claws into the thread and began to pull on it. He closed his eyes, tuning out the President as he began to speak again and ignoring the droplet of sun-heated sweat that trickled down the back of his neck. The lead revealed surprisingly little to him upon first inspection—just the vaguest sense of the location from which it came and practically nothing about the individual that had left it. He frowned and proceeded to rip asunder the fortifications protecting the strand of psychic residue until he got a peek into the hidden heart of the peculiar psionic imprint. What he found made his frown deepen.

 _“Mother,”_ Elias looked at the intersection of Martin-Luther-Straße and Belziger Straße, turning over in his mind the stripped psychic signature and the options left to him. _“There is an assassin somewhere on Belziger Straße in a private apartment.”_

_“I’m on my way.”_

_“No, stay where you are,”_ Elias relayed as he strode toward the intersection, nudging his way through the herd. _“I’ve got it, and if I don’t, someone needs to be prepared to keep our pawn from getting sniped.”_

Elias could palpably feel his mother’s disapproval through their psychic link. She eventually sighed, _“Is the target working alone?”_

 _“They—she, actually, upon further examination,”_ Elias inspected the five-story sandstone buildings lining either side of Belziger. They were somehow even drabber than those on Martin-Luther; however, they were more readily identifiable—a market, a hardware store, a pizzeria, a salon, all on the ground level. Above the first floor of each building were apartments where families stood on balconies and listened to Kennedy as he vowed his allegiance with the people of West Berlin in crude but comprehensible German. _“She seems to be working alone. I can’t sense any accomplices, but it’s still so bloody dense out here even on this side street that I can’t hear the assassin; I’m just going off a strand of her psychic signature that I caught on the wind, and I’m trying to get close enough to truly hone in—”_

Elias trailed off as the pale hair of his forearms stood on end. A blood red wisp of psionic energy curled by him, smelling of leather, lava soap, and a hint of lilac. He reached out with his mind and grasped it, knowing before he even did so to whom it belonged. He once more peeled back the protections in place around the psychic signature, and his eyes snapped up to a vacant fifth-story apartment balcony thirty feet away down on the right side of the street. He relinquished his hold on the psionic threads he had captured and peered rapidly into the minds immediately surrounding him in the sea of people and thoughts.

_“Thank God, he understands…”_

_“…Americans have such nice hair. All the German men I know look like waterlogged—”_

_“—let them come to Berlin—”_

And then the sound of music—soft, sweet, and heavy on the woodwind. Was that… Tchaikovsky’s _The Nutcracker Suite_? Of course it was. Elias almost snorted aloud at how on the nose it was. Of course even the Soviet’s telepathic defenses were rife with nationalism. Despite not being able to properly listen to the thoughts that lay concealed beneath Tchaikovsky’s Opus 71a, Elias latched onto the assassin’s mind so that he would not lose it in the chaos of the street.

He accessed the mental link to his mother and said as the people on Belziger parted around him with a little telepathic persuasion, _“Target acquired.”_

 _“K.G.B.?”_ Emma’s tone was crisp.

Elias’s brows furrowed as he came to a stop beneath the assassin’s apartment. He looked up to the assassin’s unoccupied balcony again, _The Nutcracker Suite_ playing triumphantly in his head, and brushed the psyche of the woman staked out in the flat above him. Typically, a mere touch was all the force it required for Elias to enter the mind of… well, anything. He had under his belt over a century of experience of doing this sort of task, and he was bloody good at it, but her mind held firm, refusing to budge. He tried with a little more muscle power this time, and the horns in the orchestra made a horrible sound like they were being maimed by a lion. The assassin’s psychic defenses trembled against Elias’s will but did not offer him entrance. Elias narrowed his eyes and combated the barbaric urge to snarl more or less like a brass-mauling lion.

At length, he responded to his mother: _“If the target is affiliated with the U.S.S.R.’s State Security Committee, which all evidence seems to suggest that she is, this woman has a resistance to psychic detection and infiltration unlike any K.G.B. agent we’ve ever come across.”_

Elias sensed Emma purse her lips in thought before prompting, _“Explain, darling.”_

 _“I’ve tried twice now to slip into her mind undetected, but whatever training she’s had is sound.”_ Elias crossed his arms over his chest while glaring up at the woman’s balcony. _“If I were not so vexed at the moment, I might actually be impressed.”_

 _“If you cannot sneak in the back door, detonate the front door, ignore the psychic trauma you would deal her, and barge in,”_ Emma suggested with a shrug she might give if someone asked her whether she preferred one lump or two in her morning cup of tea—it made no difference to her, because it was but a means to an end.

 _“Trust me,”_ Elias said grimly. _“I have seriously considered doing as much and just letting the resultant catatonia or extensive cerebral hemorrhaging be our calling card to her colleagues.”_

_“You are hesitant to do so. Why? We cannot lose Jack this early in the game; we still have so much more work for him to do.”_

Had Emma asked Elias why he was loath to smite the assassin when he had first contacted his mother to make her aware of the danger, he would not have had in his possession an answer better than a shoddy attempt at relaying his gut feeling to not lay siege to the woman’s brain. After having studied the exterior quality and features of the assassin’s walled mind, though, Elias had ready a more cogent and discomforting response.

 _“Do you remember in the War when we first heard rumors about the Soviet attempts to create the perfect espionage agents while we were with the Strategic Scientific Reserve?”_ Elias shifted on his feet, his gaze never once straying from the balcony. He may not have been able to read the woman’s every thought beyond the psychic wall of orchestral sound, but he could sense her movements now that he had zeroed in on her guarded psyche and could interpret incomplete information about her actions above him from the psychic imprints that drifted to him through her closed French door as though he were a magnet for psionic energies, which he was. _“Black Widows, they called them. Russian Super Soldiers that were supposed to be the future of spycraft. We brushed it off as hearsay at the time, because Erskine took with him to the grave the secret of his perfected serum.”_

_“Elias, surely not—”_

_“Do you so soon forget what our own nation was able to accomplish in a laboratory with America’s best and brightest? With Erskine and Howard Stark?”_ Elias questioned. _“If the U.S. could turn a scrawny and scrappy Irish Catholic boy from Brooklyn into a strapping 6’2” all-American Super Soldier in World War II with the help of an expatriate German Jewish scientist, what makes it so implausible that the U.S.S.R. was able to do something similar with their own brand of Super Soldier Serum after the war? If I recall, there were a few Soviet scientists on the team to turn Rogers into Captain America; they were bound to have known some of Erskine’s recipe.”_

_“I suppose it's in the realm of possibility, Elias, but I just don’t know…”_

_“No average K.G.B. agent would have the training to deflect a telepath of our caliber from slinking into their mind.”_ Elias said calmly, _“And besides, Mum, the K.G.B. would not just send out any street-level agent to assassinate the President of the United States of America; they would send their very best.”_

Silence.

Elias was beginning to think he had pushed the topic too far when his mother ultimately said, _“What is the target currently doing?”_

_“Walking to the balcony to line up her shot.”_

_“If the Soviets could make a Black Widow, however one goes about doing that,”_ Emma’s voice was hard and definitive, _“that is a resource that could come in handy later.”_

 _“I’ll tag her,”_ Elias nodded to himself. _“And then I’ll emphasize to her the fact that she will not be meddling in international affairs today.”_

He lifted a hand to his temple, and the tips of his middle and forefingers brushed the small beads of sweat that dampened his flesh and curled the ends of his coiffured hair. His irises flashed, crystalline blue becoming metallic like a polished quarter, and a harpoon-like bolt of silver psionic energy sailed upward through the air. It phased through the underside of the woman’s balcony and passed immaterial yet so very dangerous through the glass of the private apartment’s French door. Elias felt the mental bolt strike true and deep, puncturing a hole the size of a needle’s point in the assassin’s psychic barriers and piercing the depths of her psyche. 

The assassin— _Agent Natalia Alianovna, twenty-one years old, three hundred and fifty-nine confirmed kills in her professional career, zero failed missions_ —staggered, suddenly unsteady on her feet, and she caught herself with the hand not carrying a sniper rifle on the balcony door. Confusion flared above him, clear as day. Elias grinned. The tag was set, and he was in.

 _“Good afternoon, Comrade,”_ Elias simply could not resist making at least one taunt before he clocked her. Agent Alianovna started and whipped around, slipping a knife from somewhere on her person with more ease than any mildly dazed person should possess, and she prepared to hurl it at an assailant who simply was not present. _“You will not find me there, Agent Alianovna. Or would you prefer we be on a first name basis, Natalia?”_

Natalia froze, eyes darting around the small apartment. Elias saw through her eyes that a pair of handguns rested on a chipped wooden table beside at least three different stilettos and five cartridges of ammunition. The linoleum floor had not been swept in what seemed to be months judging by the dirt alone, and the yellow wallpaper on the walls was peeling in places. On the back wall was what looked to be a small armory. In the spirit of candor, Elias felt compelled to decry the apartment— _K.G.B. safe house_ —as a pigsty and think that the Soviet government should have to pay a lagniappe to its spies for forcing them to seek shelter in such a dump. His attention shifted from the apartment back to Natalia the nanosecond it took for her grip on her rifle and knife to suddenly tighten and for her to drop into a defensive stance. 

_“No need for any of that,”_ Elias chuckled in Natalia’s head. _“Enjoy your nap. Mind your weapons on the way down.”_

Natalia did not even have the time to frown before Elias pulled the plug on her consciousness and she crumpled like a marionette whose strings had been snipped, arms and legs splaying wildly. Her knife and rifle skittered across the dirty linoleum. Elias set to work on one of the many neural circuits in Natalia’s mind, placing a psychic block which would effectively sedate her for approximately seventy-two hours before deteriorating and allowing the circuit to naturally rouse itself and the rest of her brain. As he worked, though, Elias noted that Natalia’s mind was resilient even in unconsciousness. He hummed to himself in thought. His psychic block may not last the full seventy-two hours, but it would certainly keep her anesthetized long enough for his and his mother’s purposes.

Elias double-checked the psychic tag to make certain that it truly was in place and that its hooks would not slip free anytime soon. If he wanted a reliable stream of information from Natalia without her knowledge, it had to be perfect. Once satisfied with the condition of the tag, he withdrew from Natalia’s mind, leaving no trace of his presence behind for any middling psychics the K.G.B. likely employed to stumble upon.

 _“Have any difficulties?”_ Emma asked through the psychic link.

 _“None,”_ Elias turned away from the sandstone building and slipped into the crowd just in time to catch the conclusion of Kennedy’s speech. _“The tag is secure and the target will be out long enough to ensure President Kennedy’s departure and then some. Name is Natalia Alianovna. Her track record with the K.G.B. is… unparalleled, Mum, and that is mincing words.”_

 _“Good,”_ Elias could feel his mother nod in approval a block and a half away. _“Well, now all we must do is wait. If Natalia is indeed a Black Widow, she will find us, and then we can see just what she is made of when she does.”_

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Comments, critiques, and feedback are always welcome, and please kudos if you enjoyed the story so others can find it!


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